Banks Play Ball with Government to Hand Over Your Assets

Townhall.com ^ | April 6, 2014 | Bruce Bialosky

[I want the USA back]

Statists don’t think we should own anything. They use any excuse they can to confiscate money and property.

[dfwgator]

[BenLurkin]

[CodeToad]

Which is why I keep very little in a bank. I get paid and the money leaves the account. I do not trust banks not to at some point hand over everyone’s dough.

[Fee]

The danger is when the state decides an account has been inactive for six months or less it is inactive and takes it. Then the owner gets a monthly statement saying it was taken by the state and he must spend time and effort to get it back. The state decides that they took it by acident and promise to return it as soon as the legistlature passes the state budget and pay off any pressing bills first before the owner gets his money back. It could be months before the owner gets his money back. This has happen to safety deposit boxes in CA where a woman stored a few items in the box and always paid the box rental fee. CA inspectors came and decided that no one open the box for years and had the bank send a letter to the owner to claim it otherwise. Problem is most banks do not update the deposit box owner address despite the fact we have on line ability to do so on all our accounts (I learned that the hard way after I moved and changed my mailing address on line, all accounts were updated but the update of the desposit box had to be done in person or mailed letter to a separate group in the bank, my rental bill was forwarded from my old address. Went to the bank and found out address updates for boxes cannot be done on line). Result was the bank sent the letter to the woman’s old address despite she banks at the bank. Result was the state took the content of the box and auctioned all of it within 30 days. The woman discoverd the problem when the deposit box rent fee no longer came and upon the death of her husband she went to access the box for documents. Then she was informed of what happen. The state returned her documents and the cash for the family jewelry that was auctioned off at discount.

[gaijin]

Great post.

This happened to me.

[maine-iac7]

they tried this gift card theft here too - we sent ‘em packing

[maine-iac7]

Which is why I keep very little in a bank. I get paid and the money leaves the account. I do not trust banks not to at some point hand over everyone’s dough.

Agreed. Mine is SS so 'automatic' in - but I take out all but monthly bill $$ wich I pay by check.

Am considering taking all out and paying bill with MO's

Can someone tell me the advantages of a credit union over a regular bank? Is your money, privacy safer in a CU? (Not that I have enough to amount to much - but it's all relative -

[NewHampshireDuo]

After my mother died I cleaned out all of her accounts. Or so I thought. A cousin called me a few weeks ago to tell me that she was looking at the state unclaimed assets list and an account belonging to my mom was listed. I started the process (”up to 90 days”) and should see something shortly.

Apparently the account was inactive for close to 5 years. My guess is that it is some left over dividends from a small account she had but maybe we get a free dinner out or some ammo out of it.

[primrose]

I have a brother that feels the same way very little in his account.

[sauropod]

Precisely.

[bestintxas]

where does one go to view unclaimed assets in a state?

[PAR35]

Bialosky sounds pretty lazy, expecting other folks to keep up with his money. Perhaps he needs to be a bit more diligent in keeping track of his own assets.

[PAR35]

Is your money, privacy safer in a CU?

Short answer to that is 'no'. They do have an advantage of being generally less expensive for those with small accounts.

I would note that the NCUA hasn't been able to resolve a large credit union that they put into conservatorship in 2011. They apparently can't afford the hit to the insurance fund that closing it or selling it would cause. So it remains the ultimate zombie bank.

NCUA has managed to close a number of small credit unions since then.

[Cboldt]

Money in the bank is, as a matter of law, the bank’s money, not yours. Your account gives rise to a claim on a certain amount of the bank’s money.

[Fightin Whitey]

Agree with you.

I don’t know which huge bank he is dealing with but they are not in the business of tracking down Bruce Bialosky to deliver the money has left behind.

As a matter of fact the state does have a website, his nephew (not the irritable, one-of-a-kind Mr. Bialosky) found a listing for him, and he is, as he says, one of the lucky ones.

I have no praise for big banks and certainly not for big government. But a person has to watch out for his own interests. Jamie Dimon isn’t likely to call me up about the forty bucks I forgot I had. Or the four thousand either.

[ponygirl]

Sometime in the late '90s, my grandmother received a strange letter in the mail that said a distant relative whom she did not know needed her signature on a Quit Claim deed. My grandmother did not know what that was, so she asked family members. To make a very long story short, her name had been on a land deed that she had unknowingly inherited back in the 1970s. Her a-hole brother had never told her she was part-owner of this property. He had died and left it to his children, who then left it to their children. When the last daughter decided to sell it, she needed my grandmother's signature.

This resulted in a huge lawsuit, which my grandmother lost because the last nieces had squatter's rights and my grandmother had never claimed the property. (Hard to do when you don't know you own it!) It was a crappy little dirt tract, so no big loss as far as property goes, but the whole point of it is that probate is a huge deal. Make sure it's done right.

[Sherman Logan]

I wrote a column about how the state of California had passed a law to make retailers turn over any unused gift cards to the State after a set period. The law did not consider any effects on the retailer

Uhh, the retailer received the full cash value of the gift card, plus the time value of the money.

I find it difficult to come up with any particular reason a retailer should be able to just pocket these funds. One of the main reasons they're so popular with retailers is that a great many of them are never redeemed, which then becomes 100% profit for the seller.

While I'm not entirely sure it's right for the state to take the funds, the retailer certainly has no legal or moral claim to them.

The amount at stake is some billions of dollars per year in the USA.

[RedForemanRules]

The key is that the more concerned they are about something, the more they want it for themselves or to use it to control you.

“We want everyone to have healthcare”

Teanslation-We want you to come, hat in hand and beg us to treat you.

“We want to protect your unclaimed property.”

Translation-Having access only makes it easier to acquire for ourselves.